WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?????

You are sucking my bandwidth dry! There's not that much here to see, so what the hell are you doing?

So, that's it! NO MORE BYTES FOR YOU!

Time for a DENY IP for a while

Update: Let's add some Russian ones, too - 85.30.196.64 & 62.140.245.2

The Tribune had an article that said talked about reading blogs at work. I guess this started because the writer was... reading blogs at work and found this at Romensko (which I guess started because of something that was brought up at Ad Age).

Apparently, employees spend about 9% of their work-time reading blogs. And the Tribune article thinks that one of the reasons is that reading a blog looks like you're doing work (even though the blog being read is not work-related). As the Tribune writer (Steve Johnson) says: "To a boss standing at, say, 20 paces, reading a blog resembles work." Apparently, if you look at some blog stats, you'd see that page hits "peak during working hours, then plummet on weekends when, of course, there's no incentive to read them that's quite so strong as productivity avoidance".

Now, my stats start rising dramatically at about 11am and stay there all afternoon and then dip slightly over dinner and it's back up again from 7 to 8. The weekday/weekend usage tracks toward the workweek with the weekends lower.

Still, interesting that we're out on the web reading that many blogs...

Nice tweaks with the interface. Hopefully, the backend is good as well.

Well, I think I got the comments just about figured out. If you use TypeKey, you can go ahead and comment - if you don't, the comments will be moderated.

Now the exciting thing for me is to see that the new MT-Blacklist is just chugging away, doing its work to keep the spam off my comments. I mean, look what it's done in a day:

And the whole new comment moderation system in MovableType 3.15 is just a breeze to handle all this stuff.

I'm happy. Now I can just sit back... and think of more mundane crap to blog about...

I'm Back!

I am being FORCED to shutdown my blog. Yes, the administrator of my webhosting service suspended my account and I am not being allowed to run MovableType on his host.

Why? Well the CPU usage for mt.cgi shot through the roof and was averaging 80%.

Why? Because of a certain thing going on in the industry - Comment Spamming. As ANY user of MovableType knows, MT just doesn't hit a CPU utilization of 80% and sit there. MT only runs when you - as an author - are posting or rebuilding. How often is that? For me - it's barely once or twice a day. And if you use the product, you know how quick that happens.

So you just know that the issue are those damn Comment Spammers. I'm running MT 2.661 and MT-Blacklist. While this has been helpful to stop a lot of the spamming, it still happens. the MT log is filled with rejected attempts to comment. I was also starting to get hit with Trackback Spam as well.

Version 2 of MT - as far as I recall - DID perform poorly when a spammer attacked a site. I have been putting-off upgrading because of other plugs-ins I use and there compatibility with MT 3. It's been getting so bad lately that I didn't give a damn - I was going to upgrade anyway.

Then I got suspended. I guess the reason why I am just SO PISSED-OFF RIGHT NOW is that I feel that this was a knee-jerk reaction that was a bit out my control, and it was happening right in the middle of me deciding to upgrade and potentially fix the issue.

The only reason this website is up right now is the admin renamed the MT directory (and password protected it) and told me I cannot use the product anymore on his box.

He is also NOT allowing me to upgrade to MT 3.15.

So, that's it. I have to shutdown MT. There will be no more additions to this blog for as long as it's on the current webhost box.

Now, that doesn't mean this is over. Oh, no - not by any means. The website will remain up and you can always view the archives here. THE COMMENT AND TRACKBACK FEATURES OF MY BLOG ARE NOW INOPERABLE.

My INTENT is to find a a new webhosting service, preferably one that understands MT (I have a feeling that the admin of this host has no clue what the product is or does).

If anyone out there has any recommendations for a webhost that has good pricing, good service, and may have a clue about MovableType, PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY. I have one lead that seems to have good pricing with what I think is GREAT bandwidth and GREAT storage. And let's be frank - it's all about the money. I ain't making any money from this site.

I mean, for cripes sake - this is just a personal website with a bunch of pictures and a blog, people! It's not like it's a huge e-commerce site!

I really didn't want to move - I've been using a reseller for this website, and Jeff has been absolutely great over the years. I really don't want to leave him, but the admin has forced my hand and I don't have a choice.

*sigh*

So, thanks Jeff for the great service over the years. Thank you to the readers who have stopped by here over the years.

I hope to see you within a few days/weeks (better not be months!) when we're back up and running at a new host!

Don't forget, drop me a line with recommendations! Also, if you know of anybody (even yourself) that would be interested in transferring MT and the blog(s) to the new host, I am willing to entertain hiring somebody to just do it for me (my time is a bit limited recently, and if I can (reasonably) pay somebody to pick-up my MT/MySQL installation and plop it down on a new host, I would love to do it. Remember - MT is shut down and do I have any valid recent exports of my data? HELL NO! Can we do the transfer just doing MySQL exports?) I am even willing to entertain a website redesign (for $$$) if anyone wants to quote me that as well. Any way, please help me!

SEE YA!

What's been more of an effort has been trying to clean-up after those damn comment spammers. I'm using MT-Blacklist, but I'm still on MT 2 so I think it's time to go to MT 3 and get the new blacklist pieces and new comment pieces and hopefully things will work out.

I'm saying this publicly because if things get a bit "wonky" here, you'll know why.

Time to grovel to the host and ask "may I have a bit more, sir?" in my best Oliver Twist voice. Turns out we struck a deal on an annual rate for a monthly 3Gb bandwidth rate.

I feel embarrassed sometimes when I see the site going Bandwidth Exceeded. It's not like there's a lot of people that regularly read my stuff, but I feel bad that I could keep the site alive for everyone that wanted to stop by here.

Anyway, that should be a bit better for a while...